Madison, WI Short-Term Rentals: Occupancy Limits (2026)

Madison regulates short-term rentals as "Tourist Rooming Houses" under Sec. 151, MGO, and subsection (a) requires every TRH to hold a valid Tourist Rooming House Permit from the City of Madison Zoning Administrator, issued under Sec. 29, MGO, before it can operate at all. " The section carves out one exception to how that number is counted, children under the age of 12 do not count toward the maximum tourist occupancy, so a family with young children doesn't push a TRH over its cap the way an equivalent number of adult guests would.

The occupancy rule works alongside Madison's broader TRH enforcement tools: subsection (l) lets City staff inspect a TRH with 48 hours' written notice (or immediately if there's probable cause of a violation), and subsection (m) requires an on-site registry recording guest names, contact information, and stay dates for the current and prior registry year. A three-bedroom TRH, for example, is capped at six tourist occupants under the two-times-bedrooms formula, while a studio or one-bedroom unit is effectively capped lower under the same formula before hitting the 12-person ceiling.